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Adham Saleh adhamgsale5ea5 — The summer I graduated from college my boyfriend and I had an abrupt, ugly breakup, and I moved out of the apartment we'd shared and into a studio on the other side of town. It was the first and only time I ever lived by myself. The apartment was in a large, smelly building downtown, and had a Murphy bed, a clawfoot bathtub, and an antique apparatus to speak with any visitors who buzzed in from downstairs. I don't know if the phone thing worked, as I had very few people stop by while I lived there. All my friends were in Southeast, and I kept my car across the river because there was nowhere to park near my place. All I remember eating the whole time I lived in that apartment was pasta salad, and I did almost nothing that summer but drink whiskey and read crime novels. It felt nearly impossible to do anything else. I got drunk by myself and read the classics -- Chandler, Hammett -- and an unholy amount of Elmore Leonard. I couldn't read any other kind of book at all. That summer's crime spree was my only real foray into that genre, and though I enjoyed it a lot, I haven't felt much need to go back to them since. What I remember thinking then is that most of the crime books I read seemed to be thinly disguised romances, written for men. This is definitely true of Elmore Leonard. The books of his I read were essentially hardboiled emotional bodice-rippers, with exceptionally well-crafted dialogue. The other thing I remembered about the crime novels was their obsession with the question of masculinity. The detective is always a tragic hero, who epitomizes the ideals of what a man should be, while struggling with its more painful implications (you know, loneliness and violence, stuff like that). What I remembered about Chandler was only the style, and that was still there when I went back this time. What I hadn't remembered, maybe because it's more present in the later novels, is his obsession with loneliness, and with ethics, and the question of how to be a truly moral man in a deeply corrupt world. Chandler talks about the traditional mystery novel as being a puzzle to solve; his own puzzle seems to be this riddle of ethics, and how to live correctly amidst depravity. Marlowe's the sinner you scratch to get the saint, the cynic who's obviously a wounded romantic. It's a type and a cliche, but he helped create it, and the whole thing's great to watch and a lot of fun. I read the novels in here in reverse order: his last book Playback(1958), followed by The Long Goodbye (1953) (his best, I think), then The Little Sister (1949) (fun) and finally The Lady in the Lake (1943), this last being the only one I'm sure that I'd read before. Then I did the essays, his letters (also fun), and the depressing chronology of his interesting life, which was nice because it did provide some context for the fiction, and confirmed a lot of the thoughts I'd been having about his approach to writing. Chandler only seems to care about a couple of things, and he cares about them a lot. One of those is style. In his letters he basically comes out and says that he really doesn't give a shit about plot, which should already be fairly obvious to anyone who's read him. Chandler has a very rigid and developed theory of the crime novel, and concern with plot is not a big priority. There's this part in one of his letters where he complains about contemporary fiction and sort of summarizes what he thinks is essential in writing: Can I do a piece for you entitled The Insignificance of Significance, in which I demonstrate in my usual whorehouse style that it doesn't matter a damn what a novel is about, that the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words, and that the subject matter is only a springboard for the writer's imagination.... (p. 1028). And later, to somebody else: A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled. In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can makes with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you never even heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who pus his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off. He can't do it by trying, because the kind of style I am thinking about is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it (p. 1030). For instance: I stared. She caught me staring. She lifted her glance half an inch and I wasn't there anymore. But wherever I was I was holding my breath. There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-cold glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial. There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindesmith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous showpiece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler. The dream across the way was none of these, not even of that kind of world. She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color. I was still staring when a voice close to my elbow said: "I'm shockingly late. I apologize. You must blame it on this. My name's Howard Spencer. You're Marlowe, of course." (from The Long Goodbye, pp. 490-491) If you have no use for this, you have no use for Chandler. I myself do (far more use than I have, say, for blondes). I find pretty frequently that when I return to characters who seemed purely cool and glamorous to me when I was younger, through adult eyes I see that they're tragic and flawed. Women love Marlowe (with alarming frequency), but he's really alone, consciously lonely, and desperately so. Marlowe's only real intimacy is with his reader, and the staggering sense of alienation and impossible yearning to connect with others was much more intense here than I'd remembered. Since (for reasons I simply could not guess at myself) loneliness is becoming one of my personal favorite literary tropes, I did enjoy that. Marlowe is sort of the stylish model for how to be alone amidst all the urban anomie and whatnot of the modern age. How sorry I am to have missed that era. If Marlowe'd had Internet, he would've been screwed. I obviously also enjoyed all the pulpy nuts crime stuff in its nostalgic glory! This is a mid-twentieth-century-LA landscape peopled with sensual blondes, mysterious brunettes, and sinister, syringe-wielding doctors. The police brutality comes hot and heavy, here as do hip references to the dangerous narcotic marihuana, which is clearly on par with a drug like heroin, and not with the alcohol being consumed in these pages at a liver-stiffening rate. Even just as a study in changing cultural mores, these novels are fascinating. There are shows on TV now about sympathetic drug dealers, but if you put this much smoking into a show today, it'd be banned.... If the Reefer Madness-style drug references seem a bit naive and dated, and if the sexpot names Eileen, Mildred, and Mavis have not aged well, and if the non-white characters would make your average 2009 reader screech in agonies of offense.... well, the cinematic descriptions of characters and sets are as flawless and beautiful as anything like this that has ever been written. I don't feel the need to get into how the master of this genre was the master of this genre, but clearly Chandler was quite the master of this genre, plus quite a bit more, and I'd be glad to slug it out in an alley in Bay City with any two-bit thug that'd argue otherwise. Chandler himself seems to have been a pretty interesting, tragic guy, sort of the classic damaged romantic-cynic with passionate ideals and a horrific drinking problem. He'd had a classical education in England, and comes off in his non-fiction writings as something of a tortured and self-aware snob who can't miss the irony that snobbery's the reason his own genre fiction is not taken seriously. I'd actually be interested in reading a biography of Chandler at some point, and I also want to revisit his earlier novels. These books are addictive as hell, and an immersive pleasure. I myself have gotten a lot more hardboiled just from reading Chandler, and I'd recommend him to anyone who'd like to do the same, provided you're not currently trying to quit smoking.